Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy

by Thompson, Lee

  “Okay,” Brooke said, taking his hand. He glanced at the ring on her finger. It’d taken a lot of time to save for that small stone, a lot of patience, a lot of discipline, all things he wasn’t used to. She was super proud of him for his promotion from assistant-manager to manager but Blockbuster wasn’t going to make him rich. If anything, it was a dead-end full of other dead-ends. Netflix and people streaming movies online had turned the company on their head and they just couldn’t adapt fast enough to the changing times. Sometimes he didn’t think they wanted to, like so many other businesses resistant to change, and he couldn’t blame them because he wanted things to stay the way they were, too.

  The familiar, though aggravating at times, was also comfortable. The bumps in the road were ones you knew, that you’d grown accustomed to, and expected. But she’d been proud of him. Sometimes he thought it was because she didn’t make that much either as a police officer. He shrugged, holding her hand, wanting to ask her why she had so much faith in him when there were a hundred million other men just like him across the country and sucking up air around the world. He felt lucky knowing that he’d get to spend the rest of his life with her. It wasn’t like he could tell anyone about it, though he really wanted to at times. He’d tried telling Brooke once, when he first realized what he was saving his money for, and she’d kissed him and laughed it off, saying that she was the lucky one: all anyone had to do was look at her track record. He was her lucky break. She didn’t care that he wasn’t exciting. She liked his stableness and predictability. It was important for her, and for her daughter.

  Natalie said, “Are we going or what?”

  Brooke said, “I don’t like your tone.”

  Angel released her hand. “We’re going,” he said.

  He glanced in the mirror again. Natalie nodded at him, just slightly, then smiled. She was a strange kid. She liked to read a lot, skulk around, watch people. Sometimes it made him nervous. He tried to smile back and then pulled the gear shift into drive and his foot off the brake and sunlight glared off the windshield as they approached the narrow and steep road that descended into the blood red and seemingly lifeless bowl.

  *****

  Brooke had never seen herself as a needy woman. She had made her own way in the world, she provided the best she could for her daughter, and didn’t have extremely overzealous expectations about where life would take her. But she wanted to keep hanging onto Angel’s hand. He had no idea, she thought, of how much the last two weeks had meant to her, or to her mother. Even to Nat, who she figured was only cranky because it’d been the longest she’d ever been away from home and the fact that her mother was getting all gooey-eyed probably made her sick to her stomach.

  Brooke remembered what it felt like at that age. Or at least she thought she did.

  Time had a way of obscuring most details, though the feelings lingered like shadowy wisps in memory. It wasn’t something Angel would ever understand and she didn’t expect him to. She just hoped she could get Natalie to see it from the same perspective, that this new chapter of their lives was a windfall for them.

  What she saw when she looked at herself, her fiancé, and her daughter was potential. Potential like they’d never had with Bill, who had tried to live his life like he was Tony Soprano, and on top of it thinking he could hide some double life from her. He hadn’t. And she never thought he’d been as stupid and out of touch with reality as he was. She sometimes suspected that Bill had spent more hours watching old gangster shows than he did trying to spend time with his daughter, which made Brooke angry sometimes, looking back on it. And it brought a lot of guilt with it, because all the signs were there when she’d first met him at a bar.

  Angel tried. Bill never had. Angel pointed his attention outward, all of Bill’s was pointed inwards, which worked out for him because he had all the time to be pointed inward in prison.

  But all of that went on the backburner as Angel engaged the transmission and pulled back onto the deserted road and turned toward the dangerous road that ran down into Gossamer. There was no guardrail, which, as a policewoman, she considered a cause for outrage. The hardest part of witnessing how cheap the government could be was in the results, the price everyday citizens paid for an overly tight budget, one that she was sure went to paying out old favors instead of public safety.

  She didn’t want to descend into the valley. The welcome sign disturbed her, how it was not there and then was. A trick of her imagination, surely, because no one else had mentioned it. The truck handled the bumpy road well. The air conditioning chilled her skin and she was tempted to turn it off, or at least, down, but no one else had complained so she let it go and rubbed her arms, gaze on the town, the church in the distance, the rundown houses.

  The whole place looked like a toy village on a postcard. Every foot they dropped into the valley it felt like the coldness penetrated her flesh farther and squeezed up tight around her bones.

  She moved her arm, reaching for Angel’s hand again, but her limbs were stiff and her mind foggy. Heat waves danced from the hood and shimmered along the slope. A fox, or coyote, she didn’t know the difference, sat near a cluster of scrub brush dancing slightly in the breeze on a plateau. The truck jostled down, all of them quiet.

  The descent unnerved her, the stillness where there should be no stillness.

  She thought, Say something. Somebody say something.

  But all of their heads were filled with the same uneasiness, and it proved a shock to the system, to a belief system each of them had constructed to protect their fragile egos, to acknowledge anything out of the ordinary.

  *****

  Natalie usually liked the quiet, much more than she’d ever let her friends at school know, although she was sure they sometimes grew suspicious. There were a lot of times, when they were talking about boys, or talking about stupider stuff, when she’d roll her eyes, feel like she was getting dumber by the second just for breathing the same air they did.

  But they were her friends, and she loved them, and they put up with her moods, understanding that it wasn’t easy to be the daughter of a police officer, she figured. Or having a criminal for a father. A joke of a criminal, her mother had said. And Natalie had been too young to remember the event that had landed her dad in the slammer, and as much and as often as she had tried to have her mother explain exactly what happened, she grew tired of trying because it was surely something horrible seeing that Brooke never gave an inch, growing stone-faced, and heartbroken, and even if Natalie wanted to know more than anything else, it wasn’t worth it to see her mother’s heart break all over again.

  Something bad, she always thought. Real bad.

  So she learned to let it go, just accept things as they were and to cause as few waves as possible.

  Usually she liked the quiet, but at that moment, as Angel steered the truck down the narrow road, a rock face on the passenger side so close that if she rolled the window down she could reach out and touch it, and on the other side, a sheer drop off that reminded her of pictures she’d seen of the Grand Canyon, her believing that there was no way this town only had the one-mule trail to get people out of the valley and out into the real world, she didn’t like the quiet at all.

  She turned her attention back to the town. Dust danced in circles, spinning between houses as if hunting some form of life to coat.

  The sunlight beat upon shingles. A row of leafless trees lined the street that ran through the heart of the town, the off shoot dirt roads not much more than dead-ends, it seemed, none of them connecting like a normal town.

  It was much smaller than Colorado Springs. Maybe room enough for a few hundred houses for families to live their shallow lives in, so separated out here from the rest of the world. Like Angel she suspected they were a small community with some archaic religion that bound them to separation, isolation, and a casting off of worldly ways.

  A cult basically, she figured. It made sense.

  But she wondered… Where are the pe
ople?

  *****

  Angel let out a long breath as he steered the Explorer from the last of the steep road and onto the level valley floor. It felt like it’d been a mile down into the bowl. He hadn’t seen any other way in or out and the road was right there on the opposite side of the welcome sign.

  Now, his hands sweaty on the steering wheel despite the air-conditioning, he mentally kicked himself for fucking up. He knew he made himself look like a fool for not stopping for fuel sooner. Natalie had no trouble pointing that out. Brooke probably thought it as well, and he figured the ring on her finger and her thoughts of what they wanted to do with their lives, together, overshadowed any irritation she would have had with him otherwise.

  A single dirt street ran straight through the heart of Gossamer. Downtown was a half mile off but lost in the heat’s haze shimmering over the dusty road. Stunted trees that looked as if they were crossbred with a boxy shrub, stripped of leaves and weaving in the wind, lined each side of the main thoroughfare and the first side street he could see.

  He tried to remember how many offshoots he’d seen on each side of this miserable and lonely patchwork of dusty streets. Maybe ten or twenty on each side, he guessed. A small town. Weird way in and out, and more than likely treacherous at night. It didn’t make any sense to him at first, but then he figured it was probably the cheapest way to handle things in a small community that had constructed a place in the middle of nowhere. The descent had been steep though. Almost too steep for his taste and there had been a few moments he almost hit the brakes, afraid he wouldn’t be able to drive forward or put the Explorer in reverse. A lot of people probably had unfortunate accidents if they’d had a drink or two, if their brakes gave out, if their headlights weren’t sufficient.

  He tried not to think about it, telling himself that they’d be out of there long before Devil’s Night ended and Halloween morning began. They’d be at least to Trinidad by then, hopefully home. All they needed was a gas station and they could forget this leg of their journey. And yet…

  He liked the mild surprise, the obvious strangeness, the near-perfect stillness.

  Behind him, Natalie said, “Are we just going to sit here?”

  He turned around to face her, forcing himself to bite his tongue, and watch what he said.

  “No. We’re not going to sit here, but I don’t want to waste gas driving around and not be able to get back to the highway.”

  He tried to smile. It was hard going. Natalie asked what he planned to do then. Angel said, “We’re going to think about this for a second.”

  He did his best to emphasize the we’re, hoping Brooke would pick up on it, though it had, at least to his ears, rolled clumsily from his tongue.

  “We shouldn’t have come down here,” Natalie said.

  “Enough,” her mother said, which Angel was grateful for. The hardest part he already knew was going to be getting the kid to respect him, and learning to juggle the authority role with Brooke. He didn’t have a lot of confidence that it could be done and wanted to just let her be the thumb that kept her daughter in line.

  He’d had a step dad. His mother had gotten into a lot of fights with him whenever the old man had tried to discipline Angel. He didn’t want to be that guy but couldn’t find any way around it. And he feared that he would do like his stepfather had done, and try to buy forgiveness with little trips that were utterly self-serving.

  He said, trying to remain diplomatic, “What do you guys think?”

  Natalie mumbled, “You know what I think.”

  Angel thought, Well, I think you’re on your period.

  He felt bad for it but turned to Brooke and said, “What do you think?”

  Brooke shrugged. “You’re probably right. We can’t waste the gas if there’s not much left.” She stole a look at the fuel gauge, and then nodded to herself. “Okay,” she said. “The walk will do us good. There has to be somebody who can tell us where the nearest station is.”

  Wind gusted against the Explorer. The air conditioner worked hard.

  Natalie made an irritated sound from the back seat. She threw the door open.

  Angel shut the engine off and removed the key and then opened his own door, thinking that the kid would end up testing his patience in ways nothing else ever had. He had never really wanted any. It was hard enough sometimes to take care of yourself. He lit another cigarette and stabbed the lighter into his pocket and then the pack of Camels. He thought, Please God, if you’re listening, just let this be over quick.

  But God wasn’t listening.

  Only I was.

  And Peter.

  And Julian.

  *****

  Brooke exited the passenger side, purse in hand, and within seconds her skin was slicked with sweat. She grabbed her baseball cap, the Colorado State Police emblem rough against her fingers as she tugged the cap on and felt grateful she’d brought it. She wiped dust from her mouth and squinted as the wind gusted again. Brooke looked across the hood at Angel, then behind her as her daughter walked up stiffly.

  She tried to remain optimistic. At the very least she had learned that whatever life throws at you it is best to make the most of it, though to give her credit, she had no idea what exactly waited.

  Natalie said, “Well?”

  Brooke looked at Angel again. “Just walk down this main street, huh? Nothing to it.”

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  He wasn’t the most take charge man she’d ever met, but she liked that about him. It showed her that he was open to working together, which most men her experiences had taught her, were against. Sometimes violently.

  The air smelled of old dry paper and dust. She breathed through her mouth, wiped her forehead, figured someone should be around. Yet it seemed too still, even for the middle of nowhere. Not that she wasn’t used to that. In Colorado they’d spent a lot of times west of Pike’s Peak, out in rugged country where you may drive or hike all day and not see or hear another soul. She enjoyed solitude, the exercise hiking offered, the bonds you could make with the land and with your partner. She and Angel had shared many intimate times in the great outdoors, him spilling his seed on deaf ground where Brooke lay, panting, satisfied.

  She smiled a little at the memories, then breathed deeply through her mouth, catching a whiff of that old papery smell, thinking, Something about this place is different. There should be people with so many houses.

  She adjusted her stance, shifted her weight to her left leg. Late last night they’d parked in the desert not far from here, just north of Santa Fe, and they’d woke a couple hours ago, ate the last of their snacks and got back on the road. She remembered smelling that strange sulfurous smell like burning paper in the bottom of a long-dried well; she remembered feeling the heat of that scorching sun, and watching the hard and unforgiving landscape from inside the truck and feeling a strange pang in her stomach as if she’d lost something very dear to her and she just hadn’t realized what it was yet.

  Here, those feelings were stronger, although they had either subsided for a while, or she tuned them out, the way people will with things they find unpleasant.

  She shook it off. Natalie was impatient, and Angel looked unnerved, and the sooner they found a station to buy a gas can and fill the gas tank the sooner they’d get back on the road and on their way home. And that’s where she wanted to be more than anywhere. She loved her home, and she loved her daughter, and she loved Angel. And soon, so soon it felt like a dream, they would be moving Angel’s things from his dank and curtained apartment into her house, which she had worked hard at to make comfortable.

  *****

  Natalie sighed. She was hungry and the heat was nearly unbearable.

  She thought, This is so stupid. And such a waste of time.

  She held a hand above her eyes like a visor and scanned Gossamer. It was apparent that no one lived here, if they ever had. Her mom probably thought it was romantic somehow, and Angel probably saw an opportunity to prove how
manly and resourceful he was. She didn’t like it. All she wanted was to get home and lie in bed and write in her journal, maybe read some more of Stephen King’s novel Green Mile. Anything but this boring, pointless crap. She thought maybe she’d go out to the Garden of the Gods if her mom would not worry so much, and she’d get lost in the maze of beautiful flowers.

  It was too sparse here. Too lifeless. Too dry. Too ugh.

  She just didn’t know how she could convince them to drive farther up the road when her opinion didn’t really count for much. Her mother used to listen to her. And Natalie paid attention to what other children said of their parents, and in what she heard she found that she was not the only one who was put on the backburner for romantic interest.

  She sometimes thought her mother was lonely, and that the loneliness drove her towards desperation for acknowledgement, tenderness, and affection. She didn’t really blame her, thinking that in her own shoes she would also like a boy to like her and think that she was special.

  But she wouldn’t make said boy her whole world. She told herself that she wouldn’t let his presence rule her.

  They began walking toward the heart of town, which lay a half mile north. Dust puffed beneath her shoes. Stupid dust, she thought. If there was a god, he was kind of dumb for making it. She squinted as she walked, her eyes trailing from her sneakers to the sideways faces of the far distant buildings.

  The heat shimmered between her and downtown. It seemed to her that there was something massive and dark, a blot as large as a small house, in the center of the street. Dust swirled around her head and a breeze kicked up and whipped her hair in her face. She swiped it away, disgusted.

  Angel took Brooke’s hand. They walked ahead and slightly off to her left. She thought she should have stayed in the truck. But as they neared the town and still saw no life of any kind, the dark blob sitting in the center of the street becoming clearer in increments, she was glad she came because she liked odd and out-of-place structures.

  *****

  Angel stopped as they neared downtown. Up close the storefronts appeared simple in structure, like an old Western movie set, as Brooke had joked earlier.